Dear Lindsey

You described your anger very well: “like a thick fog in the early morning. I can’t think or see righting front of me”-

– here is what you do:

1. Remind yourself that the fog dissipates later in the day, it happened yesterday, it will happen again today.

2. Make sure that no matter how you feel, you will not abuse anyone. For example: you will not scream at your daughter when she talks about her father’s girlfriend.

3. Enforce strict rules for minimal contact with your ex and keep those rules yourself- do not communicate with him unless it is absolutely necessary in the context of co-parenting.

4. “it’s not fair that my ex is happy- he doesn’t deserve to be happy”-

– reminds me of two lines from the movie The Unforgiven: “deserves got nothing to do with it” and  “we all have it coming, kid”. The first is what Clint Eastwood said before he shot the sheriff who said: “I don’t deserve to die like this”, and the second was in the context of two men, a younger guy and an older (Clint Eastwood), having been hired to kill a guy who cut the face of a woman. After the younger guy killed that man, he felt badly about having killed a person for the first time in his life, so to comfort himself he said: “well, he had it coming”. Eastwood replied: we all have it coming. What he meant by it is that we will all suffer, we will all die: the good, the bad, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, all of us, everyone.

Your ex, he is not in a happily-ever-after situation. Deserving or not, he has a girlfriend now, and deserving or not, the relationship will have problems soon enough. And your ex sometimes feels that anxiety too, that terrible unease as he thinks once in a while about getting sick and dying, as we all do, and he will get sick.. and die, so he has it coming too, like everyone else.

When you feel that intense anger at him, reminds yourself that he has it coming too, it will make you feel better. Of course, don’t do anything to harm him, but rest in the knowing that he will suffer like everyone else.

Did you watch The Unforgiven?

anita